Do you know the feeling when you start reading a book and find in
writing many things you've been thinking to yourself, but some of them
you've never been able to put into words before, and others you sort of
did put them into words (like I did here
regarding the attribution of a price to our time) but that book just
takes them to a higher level? Well, this is exactly
what is happening to me with Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez Your Money or Your Life, that I am currently reading.

The funny thing is, if I had picked up this book on a bookstore, I've probably put it down after looking at the cover and not give it a second thought. That's because it boasts about teaching how to get out of debt and develop savings, reorder material priorities and live well for less, etc. In summary, a typical self-help book about personal finances, something that is not in my immediate range of interests.

Fortunately, I had read about this book before (here, for instance) and knew that it discusses things way more interesting and thought provoking, such as inner conflicts between values and lifestyle and evaluating our expenditures in light of our "life purpose", being that "life purpose" is more than simply achieving a goal (retire by 50, for instance) or acquiring some longed-for possession (e.g. buy a house).

I loved the tale about the three stonecutters, each chipping away at a large block, that illustrates the three most common kinds of purpose - goal, meaning and dedication:

A passerby approaches the first stonecutter and asks, "Excuse me, what are you doing?" The stonecutter replies rather gruffly, "Can't you see? I'm chipping away at this big hunk of stone." Approaching the second craftsman, our curious person asks the same question. This stonecutter looks up with a mixture of pride and resignation and says, "Why, I'm earning a living to take care of my wife and children." Moving to the third worker, our questioner asks, "And what are you doing?" The third stonecutter looks up, his face shining, and says with reverence, "I'm building a cathedral!"
Moral of the story: the meaning we give to an action comes from within us, not by the action.

Back to the book, it really has great practical advice that helps us look at our spending as a reflection of how we're living our lives, judge whether this is the way we really want to be living them and then, act accordingly. Chances are, we'll find we're spending way more than we think is worth on things that don't bring value to our lives and we're might be spending less on others that would put us in a path more aligned with our life purpose. I guess I could say that by showing us the financial value of getting rid of the things that are less important in our lives, this book is a sort of minimalist version of personal finances. By all means, a must read.

Meanwhile, I sent an e-mail to a Portuguese publisher suggesting they translate it - the crisis period we are going through couldn't be more appropriate. I don't know if the publisher will pay any attention to my suggestion but I believe in the power of readers consumers to change things for the better. Little by little, we can build cathedrals...

Sour cherries must be one of my favorite fruits. They're tasty, sweet enough (but not too much) and with that exquisite taste of things that are becoming rare. They hardly can be found in shops nowadays, probably because they are difficult to keep stored. Fortunately, we have several sour cherry trees growing below our garden, so every year we delight eating them raw from the trees and we also pick up a few baskets to make ginjinha - a typical Portuguese liqueur - and sour cherry jam.

Here's how.

Ginginha: pick a few handfuls of sour cherries, wash them, remove the stems (but leave them unpitted) and insert them into bottles (the bottles should become 1/3 full, more or less). Cover the cherries with white sugar and let them settle for a couple of hours. Then, fill up the bottles with a good quality aguardente (we use home-made, offered by nice neighbours, but good quality ones can be found in supermarkets too). You can add 2 cloves and/or a cinnamon stick if you like, or just leave it plain and simple. Let it infuse in a dark place, stirring it very gently once in a while (don't shake it) until the sugar completely dissolves (this should take two or three days). It is good and ready after about 6 months but can be tasted earlier, if you become too impacient. Serve in small glasses either as an aperitif or at the end of the meal.

Sour Cherry Jam: Pour 1 kg of white sugar and 1 kg of pitted and stemless sour cherries on a saucepan. You can add the juice of one lemon if you like. Bring to a rolling boil and then simmer until thickened,
stirring occasionally and skimming
any foam from the top. Divide into clean jars and immediately cover with
lids. Label and store in a cool place (no need to freeze if thick enough and jars were clean and immediately closed after filled up). This jam is delicious on a toast, used as a topping for ice-cream (which is how I've been eating mine lately) or as a filling for quick puff-pastry pies.

The day after our visit to the Neerijse, there was still time for another excursion - one of the advantages of the long Summer days is that you can finish a meeting at 18h and still manage a walk in the woods!

So we went to the Sonian forest, a large forest surrounded by the Brussels
communities with a rich history. In the Middle Ages the forest extended over the southern part of Brabant up to the walls of Brussels and it was part of the Forest of Ardennes (if you were an Asterix fan, this is where he and his pal Obelix went to hunt wildboar and Roman patrols). Along the centuries, the forest has shrunk and transformed and one of the reasons it survived until this day is because at some point, it became a royal hunting place. A sort of Belgian Tapada de Mafra, but on a different scale and with different tree species, of course. We had a wonderful walk guided by Dirk Raes, one of the foresters in charge. It was clear he not only knows his forest, but he loves it as well.

My sketch doesn't really make justice to the impressive hundred-year-old
beech trees. I should have drawn my colleagues about half the size I
did in order to get the scale right: these trees are 40-50 m high on
average, completely different in size and shape from the Iberian beech trees I'm used to see. They reminded me of giant sequoias and I guess I wouldn't be surprised if I saw a Star Wars flying speeder bike racing through them... But centenary and striking as they are, these beech trees were planted.

What I really liked to see is the way a part of the forest is being managed in a more natural way, leaving nature to its course and natural regeneration of oaks and hornbeam happening everywhere. I also liked to see how local people enjoy their forest. It was a regular evening on a work day and we saw families with children, cyclists, horse riders and people walking their dogs, though they tended to stay in the outer areas and not venture too much into the "wilder" heart of the forest...

If you go to Brussels and have a couple of hours to spare, the Sonian Forest is surely worth a visit. You can take
bus 95 from the centre of the city and in just 20 minutes, you'll get there, which is exactly what we did. I dare say you will not regret it.

July has been a traveling month and although I traveled for work, I was able to fit in some sketching.

This one was done in a nice area southeast of Brussels called Neerijse – Doode Bemde I visited with my colleagues after a day filled with meetings. It is a nature reserve of around 250 ha which has been built along the last
20-25 years by a local NGO by buying and swapping small land plots. It consists of a mosaic landscape
of grasslands, willow-alder woodland, ponds and meandering rivers Dijle and Ijse. The site is now managed together by the NGO and the local farmers. Although for someone accustomed to the Mediterranean wilderness a visit to this area is more like a walk through the countryside (it actually reminded me of the Mondego river valley near my hometown, Coimbra), the site is nice enough in the central European context and we had a wonderful guide who made the visit all the more worthwhile. In the end we had a nice beer in the adjoining pretty village of
Neerijse.

For my sketch I used my usual pen and a handy field watercolor set that includes a really nice refillable brush to transport and store water:

Last week I had to go south. I love traveling by train - I can sit but I can also walk, I don't get sick, therefore I can read, work on a report or even draw. I did a bit of everything, actually.

At some point, the air conditioner in our carriage went down, so after a while we had to move to another compartment (it was 42ºC outside, I'm not sure how hot it became inside without the air conditioner, but it was definitely too much!). The new compartment had a great temperature but better than that, it also had a great sketching subject. So I strategically chose a seat from where I could sketch this middle-aged couple with their canary in its bird-cage. As the saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining.

Whenever I think of it in advance, I take the camera with me to the garden and take a few pictures to illustrate how it changes over time. But then I save my photographs in a computer file, most of the times without any further indication than the month they were taken and then I pretty much forget about them. But the changes in a garden are so fast that we notice them literally from day to day, so a monthly archive is clearly insufficient.

Therefore, I decided to start writing regularly about our vegetable garden. This will help organizing the pictures and hopefully it will be useful to improve next year's garden and maybe it will be interesting for someone else.

This one showed up by itself and is probably a mint of some kind, but I don't know exactly which one (doesn't look like pennyroyal) and haven't had time to look it up yet, so if anyone knows what it is and cares to let me know, I'll be grateful.